by Neil M. Gunn
“Very well,” she said when he had finished. Her fingers began to work of their own accord; she did not look at them as they worked.
Five minutes later he left her, smiling vaguely as he called himself a Mousterian ass, for he had engaged Foolish Andie for a week’s labour beginning next Wednesday, which was five days hence. Also he had engaged her to knit him two pairs of stockings and promised to provide the coupons for the wool.
Presently he was enjoying the joke himself and felt oddly relieved. The only thing to do with colonels and petrologists and landowners was to challenge them on their own lake middens. And after all there was a psychological or realistic argument in employing someone of primitive intelligence inasmuch as one might test his reactions, if any, to a primitive creation like the chamber inside a cairn! That might put at least the unimaginative Blair on his back—even if the fellow hadn’t a real back to be put on.
The internal argument grew until it burst, for it was a lovely morning and the sky serene. These five days would give him time to do preliminary mapping and hunting for local lore on an exhaustive scale, while by the end of them a telegram should have brought him his box of gear. Blessedly, there was no hurry in the world, and he was going to prove himself no “barrow-digger”, that term of abuse for the old antiquary who thought he could tear the secret out of the heart of a barrow or cairn in a few hours by digging a hole in from the top!
The eye that now kept lifting to the landscape was the archaeological eye, the trained observing eye which found the most delightful interest in its exercise. Nothing was too large in mountain conformation nor too small in rabbit scrape to fail to be read like print. His research had in fact been mostly fieldwork, and in map-making he excelled, being surprisingly ingenious where correlations were involved. He could speak with warmth on the geographical approach to his subject, and here he was today with a spot of actual digging on his hands and all to himself. It made him feel like a small boy with a tight secret.
The postmaster at Kinlochoscar accepted his telegram and inquired how he had fared in getting a lodging. Grant told him he had fared extremely well. When the postmaster had extracted the detail he said, “She has the girl and the child staying with her. Ay, a sad business.” “You don’t feel it’s sad,” replied Grant, “but I must be off. I want to get a car. Thank you and good day.”
The hotel manageress was delighted to hear of his success, but when she had got the detail she said, “Anna Cameron is a very nice girl and you should be all right there.”
“I’m sure I shall,” replied Grant so genially that he dropped his hat.
She had a car, too, which she could let him have at once. “Or are you staying for lunch?”
“No, I said I would be home for lunch,” He looked at his watch. “But perhaps—a glass of sherry?”
“Certainly.” She pressed a button.
“Oh and by the way, I’ve just sent a telegram for a box, a wooden trunk. It has some of my working gear. If you see it lying about anywhere, would you——”
“Surely.”
“Bless you!” And he went to the lounge to await his sherry.
Chapter Seven
“You must always come round by the boathouse,” said Mrs Sidbury.
Simon Grant thanked her very much. “I did not realise it was so steep.”
“The local people use it occasionally,” she said with a glance at the path, which came tumbling down to the beach. “But if you go round by the boathouse, it’s quite simple.”
“I was just wanting to have a look at the caves,” he explained. “I find the whole place remarkably interesting.”
“Good! We enjoyed your visit. I hope you are quite——?”
“Absolutely. I merely overdid it. Very sorry to have troubled you.”
“No trouble at all, and I like to shake up Donald occasionally!” She had a quick fly-away manner which at the moment was attractively irresponsible. She swung a green bathing cap round her right hand. A towel hung from the crook of her left arm.
“It was very good of you,” he murmured, uncertain now about going on, for she was obviously on her way to bathe. But she smiled at his hesitation and said she would act as his guide. She spoke rapidly, telling him how as children they had always bathed from the Monster Cove. “Donald once said he saw a mermaid there. It was a summer twilight and he was all alone, aged eleven.” The memory gave her a pleasantly perverse delight, and Grant could not help observing that she had no visible bathing costume. “See those low rocks?”
“Yes,” he replied, noting what looked like a few yards of skerry.
“She was sitting on that rock combing her long golden hair.”
“The mermaid?”
“Yes.” Her quick bright laughter had something in it nervous and brittle. He wondered if she was deliberately exaggerating.
“They always do have long golden hair,” he suggested.
“Yes, too bad, isn’t it?” She was black as a blackbird but her face was white and vivid. “It’s nice all the same to sit on the rock and sunbathe. We had a game, too. We would stare and stare into the Cove until the monster formed in the dark cavern.”
“Why the monster?”
“Goodness knows,” said Mrs Sidbury. “But I am still a little uncertain. I wouldn’t, for example, even now sit with my back to the Cove the whole time.”
“No?”
“Oh no! Whoo—no!” She swung away nimbly on her white canvas shoes, her light dress with its green dragons throwing a dancer’s whirl about her bare legs.
Grant, though embarrassed, was definitely not afraid of her. Indeed he joined in her laughter, if, as it were, separately. And presently when she asked him if he had any notion why it had been called the Monster Cove, he said he might have. Hitherto she had hardly looked at him, but now she gave him a questing glance. Indeed he felt her glance steady for a moment on his face. Her dark lashes were long as spiders’ legs.
“You see, away back in Paleolithic times, in a place like this, men would naturally stay in caves. The first men did whenever they could.”
“Paleolithic?”
“Merely the name for the Old Stone Age. We have picked up chipped bits of flint or stone that they used as tools or weapons. As time went on, they learned to chip more neatly, until at last in the New Stone Age or Neolithic Age they not only chipped but ground their stones and made a very nice job of them, too, a real craftsman’s job. They also domesticated the farm animals. They were the fellows of the Neolithic Age who built the cairn up there.”
“Really?” She was now quite serious. “And how long ago was all that?”
“Well.” He smiled. “Talking generally, the Paleolithic Age goes back—what?—200,000 years? Or half a million, if you like. But the Neolithic Age lasted only six or seven thousand years and finished before the Bronze Age, which began, let us say, about 1800 B.C. in Britain. All very rough and ready, with different times for different places, and an odd thousand years or two before the Bronze Age might hardly be noticed anywhere.” He glanced at her and she smiled, but quickly as though to get the smile over.
“So——”
“So I should say it’s fairly certain that this place has been continuously settled from Neolithic times. It’s that kind of place “
“It is,” she agreed with a look at the cave mouth.
“From living in caves, some men—the more progressive, shall we say—would move over to Clachar and build huts there, round huts. We know quite a lot about the sort of huts they built. And that would ease the housing problem.”
“A housing problem even then?”
“The housing problem and the food problem—the eternal twins.”
“We don’t seem to have advanced much, do we? That’s the Monster Cove.”
The entrance was an irregular arch some twelve feet high and the eye went in over the shingle until the light grew dim.
“It turns to the left after a bit,” she explained. “We always took candles.”
>
“So you have been in?”
“Oh yes. As children, yes, but—there’s a smaller cave, with a sort of ghostly gleam——”
“You mean white? A limestone white?” He looked incredulous.
“It was our ghost anyway, by the entrance. I never went in.”
“Do you mind if I do?”
“But you haven’t a candle.”
“I have an electric torch.”
“May I go with you?”
They went forward on the noisy shingle. At first there were ledges on the left, and they were rounding these to face the inner darkness when the roof was split by a rocketing sound, terrifying in its reverberating swiftness. She cried out before she could stop herself.
“The pigeons,” she gasped, “I forgot!”
As Grant’s own heart had gone into his throat, he smiled back. He switched on his torch and moved its beam in circles. No more pigeons. As they went forward, the roof came down to meet them, the dark walls narrowed in. They waded heavily against a wave of shingle that slithered and cried with an echoing cry and the roof came so low that they stooped. Then the shingle went more quietly the other way and there was no roof but only an inner darkness.
They involuntarily stood, the cave swelling out from their breasts into a largeness that was quiet, with eyes in the cave that could pierce the dark, watching the two vulnerable creatures adventuring between the two worlds.
As the beam of light crept along the wall, Mrs Sidbury stood very close to Grant. In the moment when she saw her girlhood’s ghost, something invisible moved with so heavy and ominous a noise—a slap and stone-crack—that she cried out in real terror and gripped his left arm. He made raucous yells as he backed away, defiant and repelling, and caught two gleaming eyes against the beam. In over-swift anxiety to check the sweep of the beam he hit his leg with the torch and it fell to the ground and went out. He groped about yelling, louder than ever, became aware of Mrs Sidbury’s condition, got a blind clawing grip on her breast which all but demented her, and then had her by the arm, making for the dimness, slithering down the wave of shingle, stumbling, getting up, and entering once more the blazing sunlight.
She looked ravaged and, leaving him, staggered towards the low rock, and sat against it with bent head as if about to be sick. Grant felt very ashamed of himself. It had probably been nothing more than a damned seal. But panic had got him for a moment! His hands were trembling. Disgusting, absolutely disgusting! A seal—or some such timid brute. All at once she lay over. He went towards her.
She lay on her right side, her knees towards her chin, eyes closed. But despite the dead pallor of her face, she had not passed out. Her eyes opened, she smiled faintly and murmured, “Leave me, please.”
He straightened himself and withdrew.
Not knowing what to do, he stood looking at the sea, glanced back at her, moved restlessly, began to smile, to screw his face fiercely, deeply embarrassed, ashamed of himself, aware that he did not know what on earth to do with the woman. She was highly strung, but there was something taking about her, an overlaid innocence somewhere that nothing would ever quite kill until it killed her. His anger getting the better of him, he approached the cave, entered, went up the slow wave of slithering shingle and stood on the threshold of the dark; felt in his pocket for matches, struck one and brought the solid darkness against him. As he lifted the match it went out and he was blinded except for gleam-points that it took him a moment to realise were after-effects of the flame. He struck two matches and more slowly held them aloft. White on the floor in front; the flame burnt his fingers; the matches scattered and went out, and the box dropped from his left hand. He made a noise that was a challenging growl and hearkened with every hair on his head and bone in his body. Then he knew, as by a memory of its twisted shape: it was her towel. On hands and knees he went forward like an animal, listening, waiting for the pounce, his mouth as dry as leather. A hand landed on the towel, drew it to him, against his breast; he got up, began to back away, and presently was roaring down the stones. She was standing by the rock, and the tumbled black hair about the white face gave her in his blinking eyes a sort of still madness, the stillness of a figure on another and stranger shore.
After the pitch darkness, the light, intensified by reflection from the calm sea, was certainly very strong, so strong that the calmess of the sea itself was strange, as was the shore, and the low dark skerry. Slim and vulnerable, fragile and looking over at him, with a tragic spirit-face. He blinked hard and went towards her. The green things on her light dress were dragons; then his eyes lifted higher. “You dropped your towel.”
As she caught the towel it unrolled and two negligible pieces of green bathing costume fell on the pebbles by the rock. “Where?”
“Inside.”
“How did you find it in the dark?”
“Feeling all right now?”
“Shall we sit down?”
They sat down. “It was probably a seal,” he said. “The bulb in the torch must have burst, but I have another one. In fact, two. One acts like a lantern. You carry it by a handle. It’s very handy.”
Her head moved in acknowledgement.
“There are other caves, I understand?” he said.
“Two more, but they do not go so far in. They are quite innocent . . . That’s the old word we had.”
“It’s quite a good word.”
“Whatever it means.” She added, not looking at him, “You must not mind Donald. I wanted to say that.”
He had the feeling that was what she had wanted to say—and all she had wanted to say—from the beginning.
“I don’t. Only I’m not quite sure whether in fact I have permission to open the cairn. I feel he does not want me to.”
“That doesn’t matter. He would never interfere. So please go on.”
“Thank you. But—why doesn’t he want me to?”
“He doesn’t care whether you open it or not. It’s just that he doesn’t want people around. He—he—he doesn’t want anybody interfering. There is that, still. That’s something.”
“You want him to be interfered with?”
“Yes. And I don’t care how!” Her voice rose slightly.
The role being cast for him was not a very high or complimentary one. “Not too pleasant for me, is it?”
“But you don’t mind? If you could help . . . but perhaps you would mind . . . Yes, I see.”
“I would help if I could. Only, I’m not very good at—psychological situations. I get worked up sometimes.”
“That wouldn’t matter. That’s all to the good.” She began picking pebbles, growing bodily restless again, nervous, after her strange calm.
His admission that he got worked up had embarrassed him in the moment of its utterance, like an unexpected confession. He watched her picking the pebbles and throwing them away; observed her profile. Her silence was a suppressed cry, which he almost heard.
“You see,” she said, “he’s not interested in anything, least of all himself. He just—goes about. It’s terrible. I hope you don’t think it’s too awful of me talking like this.”
“No,” he said, “no,” and he picked up a pebble himself, but did not throw it away; he automatically examined it. Water action had made it beautifully smooth. “Did something happen to him?”
“Yes. It was the war. Finally—a prisoners’ camp.” She looked up and away. Her fist gripped a pebble and he read the fine bones of the knuckles through the skin.
“Where? In Germany?”
“No. The East.”
He waited, but she could not wait long. “I don’t know what they did to him—or what he did.” She could not bear it and jumped up with a cry and a wild gesture as if she had been hit. “Forgive me!” she cried and walked off.
He looked at the towel and the two pieces of costume strewn about the stones; he looked at her back, her bare legs, at her head which bent with the movement of a wild filly about to bolt. Her footsteps did actually quicken; t
hen they slackened and she drifted on, the sea beyond her, the green islands in the blue. At last she stopped and looked back along the shore. He picked up the towel, tucked the bathing costume inside its folds, and went towards her. Before he had gone very far the lower part of the costume fell out of the towel. He poked it in again, with an increasing sense of strangeness, of impossible intimacy.
“I’m sorry to have troubled you so much,” she said, smiling, not looking at him. As she took her belongings, he observed that her hands quivered. “It was that Cove.”
“Never mind about it,” he said. “There’s still your cap, but I’ll find it when I go back with a torch.”
“Oh yes, my cap!” She laughed a broken note or two. “I’m ashamed of myself.”
“Never mind about that,” he said in a spontaneous way, smiling, feeling friendly and kind.
She gave him a quick glance. “Thank you very much.” Then she went on.
Chapter Eight
That evening he found Mrs Cameron prepared to talk about many things, including the caves, but when he came to the folk in Clachar House, at once she showed reserve; in fact, she distinctly listened as though to make sure Anna wasn’t within hearing.
She began with “the family”, for it was an old family and a good one, she said. She spoke with a curious solemnity; there was something beyond her words, far off, and though this was mystery to him, he did not dislike it; on the contrary it built up forms and shapes distant but strangely objective and he had the odd illusion of seeing them about as figures move under destiny. Never a big family, never a chief with a clan, yet “a good family”, and always in their generations there were those of them who fought in wars in distant lands. One of them, who was a general, fought in the Peninsular War and married a Spanish wife. It was at this point that Grant became slightly excited, but when he asked her what part of Spain the wife came from, she replied that she did not know. “It must have been the north of Spain of course!” he said. “Perhaps it was,” she answered. “All I know is that they said she was very dark and very beautiful and she came from Spain.” “Quite so, quite so. Don’t let me interrupt you.” But he interrupted her several times, for he was deeply interested in the question of race, not in the modem national sense but just in race, and at the moment in the prehistoric tracing of race along the line of the megalithic culture, all the west-coast seaway from Spain to Clachar. He expected to find a skull like Martin’s or his sister’s in the cairn. Discreetly he regarded the shape of Mrs Cameron’s head . . . .
